Daweii

I doubt it but the more people seem to convince themselves of the fact he is without any solid evidence to prove otherwise then I guess he's as guilty as it gets..

Well it better go through cause large sums of money or not if it fails and we have to keep Lerner we are heading into League One guaranteed..

We're a Championship club we get what the league dictates we should have pretty much. If Moyes thinks he's too big to come here then that rules out most of the actually decent managers out there. Fortunately RDM seems pretty grounded and down to earth, it's not often a Champions League winning manager is tipped to come to a Championship club. Not to mention he has experience getting promoted from the Championship as well as winning the Champions League and FA Cup so he's probably our best shot given all other candidates.

Sounds similar to what he'd have here if Xia is telling the truth. I mean £50 million+ in the Championship is insane.

Good to see he's following our youth set up it's the most successful aspect of the club these days.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Leicester have as much chance next season of getting relegated as they do successfully defending the title. They are very much an outlier and until proven sustainable no club should base themselves on them. I am not saying what they achieved isn't impressive but it's also a one off until proven otherwise.

Probably. I don't think Garde was as tactically inept as he looked. He was about as tactically inept as Sherwood looked and I refuse to believe both are as bad as they appeared. The thing they both shared in common was the same lot of players. I think had Garde been given a chance to swap out some of the poorer players he may have done better.

Money cannot change the mindsets of those that consider Championship to be below them.

These are all pitfalls of relegation and take overs. If all goes to plan a lot of the managers will rue the day for turning us down in our darkest hours when we are a desirable Top 6 club again. I hope that Xia is keeping a note of every manager that could realistically take the job that turns us down in our time of need, if we're not worth their time now then they don't deserve to manage us when we're on the up and up.

Whether he is or isn't he's still 100x better than any player at Villa right now. If Moyes somehow enticed him to play in the Championship we'd win the league without trying.

Depends. I mean I assume we turned them down, how many people are happy to be a clear second choice? Depending on the character of the person heading the takeover they could easily be like "so now you're interested in our plans?". It may not be as easy as just going back to Oracle and accepting their terms after already discarding them.

So basically Samuelson appears to have been made the fall guy by Reading fans all because the guy he lined up bailed, something he likely had no hand in. Sounds to me like shooting the messenger almost, the club wouldn't have had financial support without Samuelson's contacts and the second it failed for whatever reason he's the one to blame not the guy doing a runner? Seems like Samuelson has a reputation of being dodgy that may be based solely on petty fan accusation more than anything.

I had heard that but also heard nothing of it since. Our takeover happened so quickly after relegation that we are very much in pretty uncharted territory. Maybe there is work happening behind the scenes, but we have heard nothing in the media about it since hearing it was meant to be a join thing. I personally think the FA have just left it up to the powers that be in the Championship.

@John I think because it has to be carried out by the Football League it won't happen until we are technically a Championship club. This won't occur until the Championship season has ended which is on May 28th when the play-off final has taken place. So I'm assuming they will start on Monday 30th May and assuming all is well it will happen pretty quickly after that.

What is there to judge? Just watch any game from last season to see what we're working with. As has been stated in the manager thread it was apparently suggested by Moyes that he would need to build three squads to hit the target of promotion, premier league stability and european domination. It's not a huge secret that our squad is beyond repair so I wouldn't be surprised if we actually spend more than £50 million getting a squad ready and it will start happening before pre-season. Moyes or Pearson or RDM will know our stronger players and our beyond shit ones just from watching a few of our matches last season, they won't need pre-season to judge 80% of the playing staff. Our main issue is finding buyers for the ones that have to leave because they are a negative influence and/or so bad they should never wear our shirt again.

I'm just gonna trust in Xia and hope we don't crash and burn. Not much else to do at this point. I think Xia has all the right intentions and the intelligence to see it through, I just hope that Villa achieve great success. Samuelson makes me nervous but at the same time this club may do well with someone that isn't as clean cut, we've been beyond honourable for decades and it gets us nowhere.

Makes sense. Hollis had already said that it was Xia's outlook and plans that made him the better option. Xia wasn't just about improving Aston Villa but improving the greater Aston area. If you add that to the fact that China would be a far more welcome host to us with their aspirations to be a great footballing nation and Xia wins hands down. Yes Oracle has absurd amounts of money but that also only gets you so far in English football before you run foul of FFP. Couple that with the fact that football (soccer) is not a very popular sport in the States and the overall deal looks less appealing.

Moyes seems to make friends with his players, not in the way that makes him weak or easy to take advantage of, but in a way that makes it very easy to get said players to always consider playing for him. I understand part of Fellaini's draw was playing for Man United but another part of it was following his boss, wouldn't surprise me if we are linked to and get quite a few former Everton guys even if they have to come down a division.

So from Garde/Black to the former Man United boss and one of Everton's best managers in their history in Moyes. Not only that but we have money something even Moyes isn't really used to having in abundance, could be one hell of a match.

I think Xia understands the reputation his country has he was likely hoping he wouldn't have to prove himself, but seems open to do so. I wonder how many people in our PR department if we even have much of one are getting fired, much of the doubt was fuelled by the official site making claims that were wide of the mark. Without that FT likely wouldn't have carried out an investigation the fans wouldn't have had such a horrible few days thinking he was a con artist, all of this links to the official site statement and nothing more.

He's our saviour!!!

It's also currently how much he has to use in this country. I'd assume that him knowing buying Villa was a real possibility he would make sure it was paid into a global account rather than into a Chinese one. That said a share of £400+ million is very tasty though before anyone tries to get negative and say "it's not as much as I thought we'd get", like I said this is likely usable funds that don't require bypassing Chinese laws there is likely more to come over the coming years if needed.

China have very strict foreign exchange laws. Unless Xia already has lots of funds outside of China he would need a way to get them out of China to do anything sizeable here. Samuelson may just be the right amount of dodgy to be Xia's underground money changer.

Reading that made me smile so much. This guy is legit it seems and he has cash and doesn't mind spending it. Samuelson is still a slight concern but maybe Chinese laws on money leaving the country is what he's there for, maybe he's just the right shade of dodgy that he's fine acting as a go between to get large sums of money out of the country. Underground money changing is a very common way to circumvent the strict foreign exchange laws, maybe that is Samuelson's whole reason to exist in this deal.

Unfortunately he's going to Barcelona. His talk of how much he knows about Champions League football has got around and clubs are impressed. He'll be going there on £450,000 a week with steep appearance bonuses and a 20% bonus every time he mentions the Champions League on Twitter. There is also talk that he is going to be groomed to be the next Messi and while some may think he's too old for that you have to realise his skill is on another level.